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Foreword to Educational Change in Correctional Institutions: Professionalizing

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Foreword to Educational Change in Correctional Institutions: Professionalizing Foreword to Educational Change in Correctional Institutions: Professionalizing Correctional Education by Applying Ken Wilber’s Ideas, by Thom Gehring In 1941, my father lied about his age—he was 17—so that he could join the Army Air Force (as it was then called) and do his part in “the great war against fascism,” as his high-school buddies called it, a phrase that turned out to be more or less accurate. He became a bombardier, then navigator, then pilot; he ended up flying 26 combat missions over Japan and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross twice, a quite rare achievement. When the Air Force split off into its own branch of the service, Dad remained on, eventually becoming a colonel and serving his country with dignity and honor for 30 years. I grew up in various Air Force bases around the country; I always considered it a terrific childhood, all things considered. In my own lifetime—I’m now 54, and Dad is doing just fine at 78 (and Mom, too, at 76)—I’ve had a lot of time to think about war, and human conflict, and this ugly business of human beings, mostly males, using power and force over one another, usually for harm, but most astonishingly, sometimes for the good. So when I am asked what the single most important and enduring result of WWII was, I usually answer, “Zen Buddhism.” What? Surely it was the defeat of Hitler and Mussolini and Hirohito, the eradication of Auschwitz, the end of fascism. Yes, clearly those are some of the deeply significant results of that war, results that made WWII the last “good war” that we might ever see, so clearly were the lines drawn. But what I have in mind about Zen is another type of defining moment, very like what happened when the Apollo astronauts, on the surface of the moon, took a photograph of the Earth: the picture of that beautiful globe, hanging in space, without a single political boundary on it, galvanized people around the world. In many important ways, we are indeed one planet, one people, one gesture of the universe, bound up in this together. Copyright © 2006 Ken Wilber. All Rights Reserved. Similarly, that is what Zen did to the humanities in this country, starting in the 50s and 60s. When D. T. Suzuki published his three-volume Essays in Zen Buddhism, it both exhilarated and terrified humanities professors across the country. Truly great philosophers were awed and often quick to jump on the bandwagon. Heidegger himself was reported to have said, “If I understand Suzuki correctly, this is what I have been trying to say all my life.” I was in the pre-med program at Duke University when I first read Suzuki, and my world came unglued. Something absolutely profound was going on here; and it wasn’t simply Zen itself— although that is a remarkable school of Buddhism—but something more like that photo of the one Earth. WWII had scrambled dozens of national eggs, and the result was a cultural world omelet. That great conflict exposed virtually every culture in the world to each other, and truly cross-cultural maps of the human condition began to emerge. We in the States were no longer “one nation, under God,” but “one planet, under many Gods”—and from that extraordinarily fertile field, entirely new forms of cultural studies and anthropology began to emerge. There were two main roads through the thicket of multiculturalism that confronted the post-WWII world: pluralism and integralism. Pluralism was by far the most common and the most widely adopted, certainly in university curricula across the country. It was generally associated with what became known as postmodernism (which, made sufficiently complicated enough to merit university study, was called “postmodern poststructuralist pluralism”)—the press settled on “multiculturalism.” The idea itself was simple enough: we have now seen a sufficiently large number of different cultures to realize that there are no cross-cultural truths, no universals common to all cultures. Each culture creates and constructs its own truths, its own ethics, its own values, none of which necessarily hold for other people, other places, other times. There are no universal truths, only shifting, culturally relative, pluralistic contexts, each of which is incommensurable, all of which are therefore doomed ultimately to be alien to the others. The study of the “Other” began accordingly to obsess academia. Or perhaps we should say, the impossibility of studying the Other, since the Other is, by the new multicultural definition that swept academia, not really understandable at all. Therefore human beings, when faced with an Other, often tend—usually tend—to seek to oppress it, dominate it, coerce it. The Other was seen as the locus of oppression, repression, and power. Cultural studies, anthropology, and the humanities accordingly became the study of the history of putative power, a field that French intellectuals, lead by Michel Foucault, tilled effectively. Since a primary locus of power has always been prisons and correctional institutions, it is no surprise that Foucault fame’s was launched with his Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Foucault’s early work exemplified in so many ways the notion of pluralism, the notion that because there are only a multitude of truths, with none of them fundamentally better than another, then any interference with another human being can only be for nefarious reasons—for reasons of power and repression. The idea was soon commonplace that all prisoners are actually political prisoners; that all mental patients are actually politically prisoners; and that all education is a coercion of what amounts to political prisoners. Schizophrenia was therefore a form of freedom from political tyranny; emptying the prisons was therefore a sign of enlightenment; doing away with a grading system was a way to free little Johnny. For all of those—prisons, hospitals, schools—were now viewed as basically the ways that one group of humans subjected another group to oppression, torture, imprisonment, and for no other than raw Nietzschean reasons, if reason is the right word. America in particular was home to this new multiculturalism, even in ways that France itself was not. American humanities students everywhere began to “deconstruct” the old cultural forms that, they believed, imposed universalist schemes on the innocent Other and thus imprisoned and oppressed the Other. By the end of the 1970s, Jacques Derrida—the most widely sited academic of that decade in American universities—proclaimed, “America is deconstruction!” Why was America open to postmodern pluralism in a way that other countries were not? Zen Buddhism. Zen, more than any other single influence, had already tilled the academic soil, had already given thunderous notice that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy. Zen had thoroughly infiltrated psychoanalysis (e.g., Erich Fromm, and through him, the entire Frankfurt School and the New School in America); it had turned philosophy on its head (via Heidegger and other heavyweights); it had even deconstructed Christianity (via Thomas Merton, who made the trek to Japan). The Beats, fueled directly by Zen espresso, had already cut away the respectability of traditional and stultifying forms, finding a freedom in all that jazz, combining something that vaguely looked like Buddhism with marijuana, wine, and free sex. Believe me, I had no quarrel with any of that. I still don’t. It was simply that, in the midst of that multicultural Picasso painting, with jagged fragments running in every which direction, a new face could also be seen emerging. If some people looked at the newly cooked world omelet and saw pluralistic schizophrenia, others saw the outlines of what looked to be a cultural one Earth photograph. Integralism is the general name for that other main current in postmodern thought. Suzuki himself was an avowed and beautifully effective integralist—no matter how his work was twisted pluralistically—as were the most influential members of the Frankfurt school (such as Habermas), and eventually, to some degree, even die-hards such as Foucault and Derrida (who finally admitted the existence of the transcendental signifier, thus ending the absolutism of deconstruction). The easiest way to summarize integralism is that it is pluralism plus universalism. Without in any way slighting the importance of cultural differences and pluralistic contexts, integralism also looks for the commonalities among cultures, the things that they share, a type of unity-in-diversity that denies neither the unity nor the diversity. In one of postmodernism’s many ironies, subsequent scholarship has demonstrated that pluralism itself is a hidden universalism. The cultural pluralist claims that there are no truths that apply to all cultures, and then gives a very long list of the many truths that apply to all cultures. The pluralist insists, for example, that all knowledge is contextual; that all values are culturally embedded; that interpretation is an inescapable component of all experience; that there is no pregiven world; and that all knowledge is intersubjectively constructed. Those items are not held to be true for only some people. They are held to be binding truths that apply to all people, at all times, in all cultures. In other words, there is not an ounce of pluralism in the pluralist’s major claims—they are held to be absolutely and universally true for all peoples and all cultures. This “performative contradiction” led one critic to state that “there are two types of universalists—honest and hypocritical.” Well, whether that is true or not, the integralist is definitely an open universalist, not a hidden one. But the universalisms are conscientiously blended with the pluralisms to disclose a “many- one” view of humanity and its history.
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